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Re: Intel Ivy Brdige Third Gen 3000 Series Reviews
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Yeah, they're certainly part of a way to enable smaller transistors.
But the issues are multiple: If you're familiar with how chips are made they use a technique called lithography to basically stencil chips. Light's wavelength becomes an issue that's insurmountable, so you've got to move to e-beam, but at 16nm that can be hard. Plus getting the materials to be pure enough and deposit well at smaller and smaller scales.
Then you simply run into the scale being such that quantum mechanical effects like tunneling become legitimate issues. Electrons can tunnel 12nm in SiO2 in some cases...that could be a huge issue.
Atoms have a finite size and in really small amounts they don't really act the same as a whole bunch of them. They act more like single atoms. If that makes sense?
Crystalline silicon's unit cell is ~.5nm across. SiO2 is bigger.
So at 10nm we're talking a number of atoms you can count on your fingers and toes.
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Last edited by Rbstr; 2012-04-23 at 10:49 PM.
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